Behold the Next New Astor Place

When was the heyday of Astor Place? In 1847, when an impresario gratified New York’s cultural pretensions by erecting its grandest opera house and opening it with an authentically Italian cast singing Verdi’s nearly new Ernani? Two years later, when patriotic populism stirred a crowd of protesters to try chasing off the English actor William Macready? In 1860, when the Republican candidate for president (Abraham Lincoln) electrified a skeptical audience in a speech at Cooper Union? Was it when the Third Avenue el clattered through in the 1870s, or after it was taken down in the 1950s, and sunlight streamed in over the low buildings? Or later, when for a couple of bucks you could buy a used Clash LP at the flea market in front of the parking lot?

Few open areas of the city have changed identity as regularly as Astor Place and adjoining Cooper Square, so every generation has its grumblers who remember the way they used to be. Now, after several years of construction on the knot of streets and plazas, the fences have been peeled away like bandages, leaving a broad and orderly plain designed by the New York architecture firm WXY. New curbs confine traffic to sensible channels rather than let it slosh across a delta of conflicting lanes. Sidewalks have been broadened into pedestrian boulevards. Astor Place in 2017 feels like fresh turf waiting to receive its next deposit of history. The young techies and skateboarders and students who swirl through these days know only its current, amiably deluxe incarnation, a symphony in metal and glass: Fukihiko Maki’s office building, as glossy and black as a Steinway grand; Charles Gwathmey’s amoeboid turquoise tower on the south side of the square; Thom Mayne’s self-deconstructing Cooper Union academic center; and, farther downtown, the starchy white Standard East Village hotel. If there are older habitués who still remember the neighborhood’s corral of dilapidated buildings, they are vastly outnumbered by the callow throngs. Even the scattering of saplings and Piet Oudolf’s still-fragile plantings in their new beds seem to sing of youth.

In this amnesiac corner of a nostalgic city, memory is preserved in architectural artifacts. A strip in the sidewalk marks the direction of now-erased Stuyvesant Street, and a stand of mosaic-covered poles recalls the Astor Place of a generation ago. In the 1980s, a Vietnam vet named Jim Power exorcised his demons by encrusting lampposts with little tiles, turning steel poles into colorful monuments to local heroes and landmarks. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani decreed them to be vandalism and ordered most of them ripped out, but a corps of activist residents defended the lampposts as guerrilla street art. In today’s Astor Place, they are something else: survivors and relics. Carefully removed before construction, restored, and now returned, they stand as glittery witnesses of a more freewheeling time. (Just try adorning several dozen utility poles without authorization in today’s Manhattan: You’d be courting a swat-team intervention.) Power’s totems are not the first bit of wistful artifice to enter the square. The gracious subway kiosk in the middle may look like it’s been there since the IRT opened in 1904; actually, it’s a 1986 reproduction.

Much of Astor Place has been reclaimed from car traffic.
Photo: Wade Zimmerman/Courtesy of WXY Studio

Cooper Square is not a square, and Astor Place is not a piazza but a two-block thoroughfare that the redesign has truncated to one, running from Broadway to Lafayette Street. The wide, busy triangle has no name: It’s just a haphazard clearing formed by the intersection of angled streets. In the mid–19th century, this was a border zone between two vastly different worlds: one patrician and decorous, the other rowdy and poor. In his bookThe Shakespeare Riots, Nigel Cliff describes the polar contrast between genteel Broadway and the Bowery, that boulevard of penny-ante hustles. On Bowery, he writes, “Flames smelling of turpentine illuminated glass signs advertising cockpits, rat-baiting arenas, boxing rings, dime museums, bowling alleys, and gambling dens, together with scores of taverns and beer gardens, some of which served firewater through a rubber tube straight from the barrel at three cents a gulp.”

Even as recently as a couple of decades ago, this area formed a junction of classes and lifestyles. Ukrainians wandered in from the borscht and pierogi joints on Second Avenue, squatters and punks from Tompkins Square Park and Alphabet City; addicts and alcoholics drifted up from the Bowery. At Astor Place, they met clean-cut newcomers, NYU professors, and aging hippies, along with the new wave of West Village bankers on their weekend slumming excursions.

The triangle no longer has that souk­like vibe, and no amount of street design can bring it back, but, with a combination of modesty and flair, WXY has literally paved the way for the next iteration. The architects have sprinkled the plaza with an assortment of seating options: stone steps, a few handsome granite blocks, and several of the firm’s signature “zipper benches,” which look like solidified sound waves that have alighted on the asphalt. But most of the design inhabits a thin plane between the heavy-duty surgery belowground and the evolving architecture above. Streets and plazas depend on details that slip underfoot, unnoticed. New sinuous edges enclosing the old Peter Cooper Park, porous pavers that keep rainwater from pooling, strategically placed soil beds that draw and store storm water, preventing the streets from turning into cataracts — unless you’re a road-design junkie, these operate at the subliminal level, which is precisely the point. Claire Weisz, WXY’s co-founder, has used what she calls a “DoT palette,” materials plain and tough enough to satisfy the Department of Transportation, which means that rather than having the sleek preciousness of a corporate plaza, Astor Place and Cooper Square look like what they are: city streets.

This is distinguished, if self-effacing, public design. The complex of new plazas sets off the existing structures. Tony Rosenthal’s Alamo is back where it was last seen in 2014, only now the big black cube balances en pointe on a broad plaza rather than a traffic-ringed reef. Mayne’s molting battleship looks newly impressive from vantage points that no longer sit in the middle of traffic. The ornate subway entrance, too, has acquired a fresh old-­fashioned graciousness. But the longevity of WXY’s design will depend on how it shapes the future, not how it frames the past. The new pedestrian areas are ample enough — a full acre, all told — that they could (but do not yet) accommodate several competing outdoor cafés, a farmers’ market, a political rally, craft kiosks, and pop-up pavilions designed by Cooper Union’s architecture students. The design is a blackboard full of possibilities, and it is up to those who inhabit it to chalk the next chapter onto its waiting surface.

*This article appears in the January 9, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, uses an unofficial online messaging service for official White House business, including with foreign contacts, his lawyer told the House Oversight Committee late last year.

The lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he was not aware if Mr. Kushner had communicated classified information on the service, WhatsApp, and said that because he took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council, his client was not in violation of federal records laws.

In a letter disclosing the information, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee said that he was investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act by members of the Trump administration, including Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. He accused the White House of stonewalling his committee on information it had requested for months.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to stop disparaging the late Sen. John McCain, calling the Vietnam war hero “a dear friend” and defending him against the president’s criticisms. …

Ernst’s remarks came during a town hall meeting at a high school in Adel, Iowa, where several attendees voiced anger about Trump’s attacks about McCain. One attendee described McCain as a “genuine war hero” and called Trump’s comments about McCain “cowardly.”

“I do not appreciate his tweets,” Ernst said, when pressed by the attendee why she didn’t previously speak out more forcefully. “John McCain is a dear friend of mine. So, no I don’t agree with President Trump and he does need to stop.”

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.